New answers tagged medieval
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The main issue with a sound based system is that at sea, sound may not be heard. A ship can get very loud between wind in the rigging and and the rushing of the water. Horn signals will carry downwind, but upwind may be completely inaudible. Even on the same ship you soon need to resort to shouting to get understood.
Sound being an active signal is also a ...
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Yes, and it is in use today.
Foghorns are still used in both static installations and aboard ships; as an example, this is the identification pattern used on the Golden Gate Bridge:
Some buoys are also equipped with bells, for similar reasons.
Cadences are more commonly-used in the real world than tonal differences, but they both could work.
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You mentioned the graeco-roman period. Galleys had hortators or keleustes who would set the pace with a drum. It would be conceivable that different nations use different instruments and that they are loud enough to be heard at usual engagement ranges.
This would work mostly for warships under oars, of course.
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I think a system like this could work, if the object that needed to be identified could have some kind of structure that was identifiable under sonar. Just like bats use echolocation to orient themselves and detect their environment, so too could a sound-based system, suggesting a means of discovery of the technology. Sounds like a cool idea!
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The benefit of the flag system is that you don't have to memorize every nation/entity. The flag is persistent, so you can look it up, ask around (the captain has to sleep sometime), or hazard a guess. Sound is ephemeral. It happens, and then it's gone. Having a complicated system of notes would be extremely hard, especially when you take the doppler effect ...
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The most useful stuff I can think of is as follows
Chalk - You can mark paths to find your way home
Canary - Warning for bad air
Pick/hammer - Breaking rocks and digging
Flint - for fire
Knife - general use
Rope - Climbing
Steel Spikes - Anchor points to attach the rope
Bioluminescent fungi - In total darkness you don't need much light to see and fungi ...
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How about a magical shape shifting hammer. It could morph into a hammer, an pick, and ax, a short sword, or any other similar sized tool. It could also glow to provide light or emit sparks to ignite fire.
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This is really a big topic. But I'll try to discuss it.
I don't see any reasonable empire/kingdom going to war over a silly thing thing such as trying prove they are the best. Most, like 99% if not all, of the world's clashes/wars...etc had actual real materialistic goals.
So I really doubt that either would go to war based on that reasoning.
However ...
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There are many more places in the Old World other than the stereotypical East and West. "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" in a 19th century idea, and a reductionist one at that. Even the Victorians knew full well that it was grossly reductionist.
As regards to your specific examples:
In Europe, the everyday meal was bread. ...
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It will look a lot like a zoo
Each enclosure will need to be purpose built based on what you are trying to contain. If you need to contain a hill giant, you'll want an enclosure with massive, thick walls and no protrusions to climb on. If you want to contain a creature that can turn into fog, you will need to make an airtight chamber sealed with special ...
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strategy is based on available resources, so almost nothing from modern warfare could be implemented. Camouflage painting maybe. But historical knowledge of military expert could give to Gary things like:
- advanced fortification, both field and long-term
- something like spanish tertia (offtopic - I tried to recreate it in M&B PoP, if ya know what I ...
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The book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society - and this video - reports that:
90% of rifles found dropped at the Battle of Gettysburg were loaded.
This and other evidence indicates an innate human resistance to killing, manifesting in not shooting when they have the chance, or not aiming when they shoot.
Modern armies ...
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If your players are just trying to figure out their profit that's a bit easier than crop yields.
Throughout D&D systems, land was valued at the profit it could produce in a 5 year period. Typically farmland is valued at 50 gp/acre, meadow land is similar. So 2500 acres x 50 gp / 5 years is 25,000 gp/year or 68.5 gp/day.
(note that this is the profit ...
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Gustavus Adolphus brought the concept of COMBINED ARMS to the old world. Same weapons as everybody else, but a different way to organize and train and fight that made combat more effective at the unit level.
Also, sci-fi author H. Beam Piper liked using real battles in his time-travel (heh) stories. He is worth a look.
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I am no expert but here are a few things I think modern warfare knowledge might bring:
1) A destruction of arbitrary classes
Training, armor, and weapons were often distributed based on societal status. This lead to horribly trained foot-soldiers with insufficient weapons. As others have pointed out, this also resulted in very useful tools like crossbows ...
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Potatoes are a total game changers.
"Many researchers believe that the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there" according to a piece in the Smithsonian*. It is even argued that the far greater productivity gave rise to the age of empires.
If you have the climate - like Ireland - you can get rid of the labor-intensive business of ...
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To take a full profit from our modern warfare knowledge, Gary would need:
knowledge of the warfare theories (Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, for example),
knowledge of past battles and used tactics (review of what was done, why, and what was the outcome would be profitable),
knowledge of the technology/tactics and troops available to him (nice and great to know ...
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To our modern minds, reading medieval military history can be quite puzzling as often the kings and armies involved don't behave as we'd expect them to if they were trying their hardest to "win the war" as we'd imagine they'd want to.
A modern theory of warfare is to seek out the enemy on the battlefield, destroy their army, leave them defenseless, and then ...
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There have been a lot of good answers on where modern warfare theory can help, and where the technological limitations are overbearing. Eg. Logistical, manpower and financial issues of large warhosts and prolonged military campaigns.
I would like to point out the distinct differences between tactics, strategy and grand strategy. Eg. is your setting of ...
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Modern tactics would be probably of less use than knowing historical tactics. There were a bunch of effective ideas scattered across Middle ages and early Renaissance, that work with medieval resources. Just some ideas off the top of my head:
Make your peasants performing some basic training all year long, so they are more fit and skilled when the time ...
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I am not an expert but I did find a few things. Everything I found is about grains, specifically wheat, rye, barley, and oats. I tried to find things on the other plants you asked about, but could not find anything I deemed of use. I don't know if what I found will be of any use, but here it is:
The most common means of calculating yield was the number of ...
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It seems to me reading the existing fantastic answers that in order to successfully establish any sense of modern military tactics in medieval Europe you must first shore up the shamble that is medieval economics and production.
A society is built upon its lowest level and so that is where changes should be made. The vast majority of medieval populations ...
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Lots of excellent stuff here so here is my 2 cents.
One of the biggest "modern" warfare things that Lord Gary could adopt that was not very common is the concept of Meritocracy in his army.
Throughout history this always seems to present an odd dichotomy, as some of the most terrifying and effective Armies in history had at least a bit of this going on. ...
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Honestly the 'modern' military theory that would give Lord Gary the biggest advantage would be modern attitudes towards hygiene. It was extremely common in the time period you're talking about for a force to lose more troops to dysentery and other diseases than they lost in actual combat.
By taking a very firm attitude towards latrine maintenance and ...
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There are several relevant Clausewitzian, Jominian, and Machiavellian concepts that would benefit Lord Gary. While some of these seem obvious to us, recall that most wisdom seems rather obvious in retrospect.
Clausewitz: War is an extension of politics, and wars have political goals. Putting 'war' in the 'politics' box doesn't reduce war, it expands the ...
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Modern warfare requires modern weapons/tools. So... many tactics, formations and most rules do not apply because neither enemy nor they themselves do have the tools to make them useful.
What would come in handy would be the modern training methods, ranking system, execution of commands/discipline and how supply chains are set up. Also, many 'modern' ideas, ...
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I'm no expert, but here's my 2 cents.
I think in terms of organization and logistics Gary would be ahead of the rest.
If Gary knows modern warfare he might also know the entire history of warfare that happened after the middle ages.
Gary could take inspiration from the battle of Agincourt and deploy many longbowmen in his army for example. Another thing ...
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The question shows a misunderstanding of why the Middle Ages were medieval. It's not that the people who lived in those times did not know any better. They did. In particular, they had good Roman books about military strategy, tactics and logistics; for example, they had and they actually read Vegetius's De re militari; the book was copied over and over, and ...
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I'm not really sure what you mean by modern warfare theory. I'm going to make the assumption that you're talking about logistics, and possibly wargaming scenarios.
Logistics could be interesting. Generally, at least in European Warfare, as a soldier you provided your equipment and scavenged off the land(cheating a little with the link here - https://en....
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would modern warfare theory be useful to Gary against his enemies? How would his medieval army, tactic, and strategy change using only resources available at the time?
I am not an expert of modern warfare, but I doubt what we call modern warfare would be of any use in middle ages. Let's look at some of the key points of modern warfare
Aerial supremacy and ...
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Badly knocked about, suffering from hypothermia, probably delirious. They have to be unaware of their surroundings, without speech or memory for an extended period, ideally weeks. Is this possible given medieval tech?
Yes. You can keep them drugged with one of several plant alkaloids (poppy juice should do). By careful administration, you can fulfill your ...
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